More companies than ever before are choosing to run stateful workloads—such as relational databases, AI inferencing, and messaging queues—on Kubernetes. For developers building on Kubernetes, storage performance has never been more important.
Today, we’re announcing the next major release of Azure Container Storage – v2.0.0. Compared to prior versions, it delivers up to 7 times higher IOPS, 4 times less latency, and improved resource efficiency. With built-in support for local NVMe drives, Azure Container Storage now delivers our fastest, most powerful Kubernetes storage platform on Azure. It’s now also completely free to use, and available as an open-source version for installation on non-AKS clusters. Whether you’re running stateful applications in production, scaling AI workloads, or streamlining dev/test environments, this major release’s performance will give your workloads a considerable boost.
What’s Azure Container Storage?
Before we dive into the latest enhancements, let’s take a moment to revisit what Azure Container Storage is and how developers run stateful workloads on Kubernetes with speed, simplicity, and reliability.
Azure Container Storage is a cloud-native volume management and orchestration service specifically designed for Kubernetes. It integrates seamlessly with AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) to enable provisioning of persistent volumes for production-scale, stateful workloads.
Azure Container Storage’s vision is to serve as the unified block storage orchestrator for Kubernetes workloads on Azure, providing a consistent experience across multiple storage backends for simplified volume orchestration via Kubernetes APIs. This v2.0.0 release focuses specifically on breakthrough performance with local NVMe storage, bringing enterprise-grade performance with cloud-native simplicity. Later this year, we’ll be debuting support for Azure Container Storage to integrate with Elastic SAN.
Azure Container Storage delivers optimized performance and efficiency with low-latency storage for high throughput stateful applications, along with built-in orchestration and automation that allows Kubernetes to manage storage pools, persistent volume lifecycles, snapshots, and scaling—all without switching contexts or managing individual CSI (container storage interface) drivers.
What’s new?
There’s quite a bit to unpack here, so let’s take a deeper dive into some of the key benefits that Azure Container Storage v2.0.0 delivers:
Pricing changes
As before, you’ll continue to pay for the underlying storage backend you use. But Azure Container Storage versions 2.0.0 and beyond will no longer charge a per-GB monthly fee for storage pools larger than 5 TiB for both our first party managed and open-source version, making the service now completely free to use. Provision as much storage as you need without worrying about additional management fees. This means you get enterprise-grade storage orchestration and breakthrough performance without any additional service costs—just pure value for your Kubernetes workloads.
Enhanced performance with reduced resource consumption
This release of Azure Container Storage is optimized specifically for local NVMe drives provided with a variety of VM families. This focus unlocks the fastest possible I/O performance for your most demanding workloads while reducing infrastructure costs.
Perhaps most exciting, this latest version of Azure Container Storage on local NVMe is now faster than ever before. We’ve rebuilt our architecture from the ground up—from the kernel level to the control plane—to push the limits of our storage orchestrator. This dramatic speed improvement comes with an equally impressive reduction in cluster resource consumption. Previously, Azure Container Storage on local NVMe had three performance modes that could consume 12.5%, 25%, or 50% of your node pool’s CPU cores. Azure Container Storage v2.0.0 no longer has performance tiers. Instead, it delivers superior performance while using fewer resources than even our previous lowest-impact setting. This translates directly to cost savings—you get better performance while freeing up CPU capacity for your applications to perform even faster.
Let’s look at the benchmarks. On fio (Flexible I/O Tester), the open-source industry standard for storage testing, Azure Container Storage on NVMe delivers approximately 7 times higher IOPS and 4 times less latency compared to the previous version.
But how does this translate to real workloads? We tested our own PostgreSQL for AKS deployment guide and found that PostgreSQL’s transactions per second improved by 60% while cutting latency by over 30%. For database-driven applications, this means faster query responses, higher throughput, and better user experiences.
All in all, Azure Container Storage delivers a significant performance boost for I/O-demanding workloads out of the box without additional configuration needed, offering developers a simple yet powerful tool in their cloud-native arsenal.
Accelerated AI model loading and KAITO Integration
For AI and machine learning workloads, model loading time can be a significant bottleneck. Azure VMs equipped with GPUs have local NVMe drives available. With the latest NVMe enhancements in the new v2.0.0 version, Azure Container Storage takes advantage of this hardware by dramatically accelerating model file loading for AI inferencing workloads. With our recent integration with KAITO, the first Kubernetes-native controller for automating AI model deployment, you can now deploy and scale AI models faster than ever, reducing time-to-inference and improving overall AI application responsiveness.
We loaded Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct LLM and found a 5 times improvement in model file loading speed with Azure Container Storage v2.0.0, compared to using an ephemeral OS disk.
More flexible scaling options
Azure Container Storage previously required a minimum of three nodes when using ephemeral drives. It now works with clusters of any size, including single-node deployments. This flexibility is particularly valuable for applications with robust built-in replication or backup capabilities, development environments, and edge deployments where you need high-performance storage without the overhead of larger clusters. The elimination of minimum node requirements also reduces costs for smaller deployments while maintaining the same high-performance capabilities.
Open source and community support
We recognize how important the open-source community is to the health and spirit of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Azure Container Storage version 2.0.0 is now built on our newly created open-source repositories, making it accessible to the broader Kubernetes community.
Whether you need the Azure-managed version for seamless AKS integration or prefer the community open-source version for self-hosted Kubernetes clusters, you get the same great product and features. The open-source approach also means easier installation, greater transparency, and the ability to contribute to the project’s evolution.
Explore our open-source repository (local-csi-driver), and learn more about our related block storage products:
- Azure Container Storage enabled by Azure Arc
- Use Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for Azure Disk on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
In summary
This major update to Azure Container Storage delivers a faster and leaner high-performance Kubernetes storage platform. Here’s what you get:
- Included out of the box: This release focuses on ephemeral drives (local NVMe and temporary SSD) provided with select VM families, including storage-optimized L-series, GPU-enabled ND-series, and general-purpose Da-series.
- Enhanced workload support: Optimized for demanding applications like PostgreSQL databases and KAITO-managed AI model serving.
- Superior performance: 7 times improvement in read/write IOPS and 4 times reduction in latency, with 60% better PostgreSQL transaction throughput.
- Open source: Built on open-source foundations with community repositories for easier installation on any Kubernetes cluster.
- Flexible scaling: Deploy on clusters with as few as one node—no minimum cluster size requirements.
- Zero service fees: Completely free to use for all storage pool sizes—you only pay for underlying storage.
Getting started
Ready to experience the performance boost? Here are your next steps:
- New to Azure Container Storage? Start with our comprehensive documentation.
- Deploying specific workloads? Check out our updated deployment guide for PostgreSQL.
- Want the open-source version? Visit our GitHub repository for installation instructions.
- Have questions or feedback? Reach out to our team at AskContainerStorage@microsoft.com.
Regardless of your workload, Azure Container Storage provides the performance and ease you expect from modern cloud-native storage. We’re excited to see what you build—and we’d love to hear your feedback. Happy hacking!
The post Accelerating AI and databases with Azure Container Storage, now 7 times faster and open source appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
